of Halloween, endings & beginnings

Halloween is by far my favorite holiday although there’s a certain amount of melancholy that comes with it. Although I live in a city that embraces Halloween, many of the people in my life seem to see it as “just for kids.” It’s not. Nor should it be. While I don’t celebrate as much as I used to [the parade is too crowded, Pernod & black & late nights during the week have lost their appeal]. I still love the costumes, the music, the films… This past weekend I went with friends to see a performance by Radio Theatre NYC of two HP Lovecraft tales. It was fun: there were wigs, silly hats, scary masks, lots of theatrical fog. Tonight we’ll go to the Merchant’s House Museum to hear more scary tales. And then Halloween will be over for another year. And that brings with it a certain sadness, a wistfulness – perhaps brought on from reading too much Poe or Carter or watching one too many vampire movies.

The end of Halloween is also a time for beginnings – November 1st means the start of NaNoWriMo and I’ll try again this year to write the bones of a novel. I’m not overly optimistic this time around. I work 40 hrs a week at a non-writing job, have a dissertation to work on, several book reviews due by mid-November, not to mention stacks of manuscripts to read for BLP. A fellow writer friend once said that our lives are mainly composed of all the many things we do to keep ourselves from writing. There is a truth to what she says: how many hours have I spent busily not writing? Or is it instead what another friend says, that everything we do – the way we live in the world, how we understand the world around us, everything we see, feel, taste, touch, hear, etc. – all of this makes up the act that is writing. Certainly now when I sit down to write, I feel that I have more “tools” to work with [and I’m not just talking about my sharp editorial skills] but does that make up for all the hours lost to everything else when I really could be, should be writing?

Another friend asked me to send her a list of my “favorite horror movies.” But there are also other lists that go with that: music, books, cocktails, shoes. As a (semi)retired Goth, getting spooky is serious business to me. Here are just a few films & books to wrap this up in a seasonal way:

Films: Dracula (1931) The Innocents (1961) Nosferatu (1922) Don’t Look Now (1973) Hellraiser (1987) Bride of Frankenstein (1935) The Shining (1980) The Others (2001) The Exorcist (1973) Horror of Dracula (1958) Nosferatu (1979) A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) Let the Right One In (2008) Carnival of Souls (1962) Shadow of the Vampire (2000) Daughters of Darkness (1971)

Books: The Bloody Chamber & other stories/Carter, Frankenstein/Wollstonecraft Shelley, Dracula/Stoker, Northanger Abbey/Austen, Carmilla/Le Fanu, Complete Poe, The Haunting of Hill House/Jackson, We Have always Live in the Castle/Jackson, The Call of Cthulhu/Lovecraft, In a glass Darkly/Le Fanu, Interview w/a Vampire/Rice, Lost Souls/Brite, Coldheart Canyon/Barker